There's a divide in vibe coding discourse. Some claim it's a distraction, while data seems to indicate the opposite.
These are not mutually exclusive. The difference is two key characteristics - and they're the same skills that make a good manager.
Opinionatedness
To create something great, you have to know what you want. A valid alternative is knowing how to figure out what you want.
That means being opinionated or having the agency to form an opinion.
The best product thinkers have 10 things they would change about every app. The best builders are exactly the same.
Product direction is much more important than speed - you can take a flight from Dallas to Austin, but I can arrive faster in a car if you stop in New York.
Vibe coding makes it easy to get distracted and create 10 half-baked apps instead 1 fully-baked app, which is why most vibe coded portfolios end up looking like Sid's bedroom.
Agents can not yet fix discipline & focus.
Knowing what you want and having strong opinions about how to get there is the first step to building anything great - which isn't to say you need to have that figured out when you start, but you need to know how to figure it out.
The first thing I ask someone struggling with AI is “tell me exactly what you want.”
You'd be shocked at how few people can answer.
Once you know what you want, success is breaking it down it into concrete steps & expressing each in a way a computer understands.
That comes down to vocabulary.
Vocabulary
It's pretty annoying to spend days on a small feature. It's more annoying to spend days on a small feature that was already built by someone else.
If you have a problem, it's very likely someone else has had the exact same problem. In 50+ years of software, it's also pretty likely someone has documented how to solve it.
So your job as a manager of agents, is to find the largest level of granularity possible at which that solution exists, then direct your agent to it.